Medical science was baffled. The only thing doctors could do was try to comfort the sufferers, or experiment with treatments that didn't work - then watch them die.

One of those frustrated doctors was John Turner, an endocrinologist at Graduate Hospital, who would become one of the leading physicians and advocates in the long hard struggle to first identify, then treat the disease, then convince governments of the need to provide money for treatment and prevention.

The disease is acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

It wasn't identified as such until the early '80s. Before that, it went by various names, including the "gay disease," because in the early days it affected predominantly homosexual men.

One of the obstacles that early physicians had to deal with was the stigma of the disease. There was a lack of public concern because people felt it affected only gay men, who some felt were only getting their just punishment for a sinful lifestyle.

All that changed over the years, especially when straight men, women and children began to contract the disease, and John Turner was in the forefront of making those changes happen.

He died Friday of complications of a degenerative neuro-muscular disease. He was 63 and lived in Deptford, N.J.

"In the 1980s, when AIDS was new and there were no drugs, or drugs that were virtually useless, when people were dying every single day and there seemed to be no end in sight, every patient who went to see John in those days left his office less afraid than when they went in," said Jane Shull, director of Philadelphia FIGHT, an AIDS advocacy group founded by John Turner.

This kind, compassionate doctor couldn't always hide his anger when discussing what he called the "extraordinary bungling" nationwide by the federal and local government in handling AIDS.

In a speech to hospital administrators only a few years after AIDS was identified, he vented some of this anger, then regretted his outburst.

"Afterwards I thought, 'Oh, my God, what have I done?' " he said. "That's not like me. I hate confrontation. I'm not a screamer. I'm usually optimistic."

It was that spirit of optimism that he tried to pass on to his patients in the early days, long before the "cocktail" of drugs, which he helped develop, that keeps the disease under control.

Hope was the only thing he could offer his patients. Nothing else worked.